Agnès Gayraud – 69 stratégies obliques pour faire des chansons d'amour, 2024

Philosopher, journalist, as well as singersongwriter and performer in a project she calls La Féline, Agnès Gayraud explores the expressive quallities of pop music in essays and in her songs. From her book Dialectique de la Pop (La Découverte, 2018) to her latest album Tarbes (Kwaidan Records, 2023), her critical and musical work takes in literary chanson, new wave and electric folk. Her first performance installation, 69 oblique strategies for love-song-making, sets in train a philosophical and artistic engagement with love songs that leads, through game and chance, to a sincere expression of personal feelings.

Agnès Gayraud’s creative musical installation examines the writing, composition and performance of a love song. The work takes the form of a recording studio, in which five groups or performers with different musical styles are asked to play a cover version of their own choice following precise rules. Every two hours, the musicians draw a card from the 69 oblique strategies in the making of a love song. It is inspired by the pack of cards devised by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975 (Oblique strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas), as a way of providing artists with a few enigmatic pieces of advice to help break creative blocks. Drawing on literary and theoretical works, books on psychology, GPT Chat, private text messages and personal anecdotes, Agnès Gayraud’s cards create the conditions for a sincere and inventive reappropriation of popular love song.